This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to export permissions in a claims-based social networking system.
In recent years, social networking systems have enabled users to share information about themselves, their friends, and their interests and preferences in real-world concepts with other users and entities, such as their favorite movies, musicians, celebrities, soft drinks, hobbies, sports teams, and activities. Users may also include biographical information about themselves, such as where they grew up, what colleges and universities they attended, where they have worked, their current contact information, and so forth. The amount of information gathered from users is staggering—information describing recent moves to a new city, political preferences, causes, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like. Entities may also declare attributes, affiliations, and other information, such as pages representing businesses, groups of users representing various organizations, and applications operating on social networking systems on behalf an entity.
Users may also interact with these entities through various applications on the social networking systems, providing more information about the users based on their interactions on the social networking systems. A social graph of nodes interconnected by edges may be created through these interactions between users, entities, and other nodes on social networking systems. The edges representing interactions between the nodes have been assumed to be based on absolute truth and have been generated from the perspective of the user. In this way, a user may express interests and share information with other users and entities in social networking systems.
As social networking systems have begun providing tools for users to share information about themselves, this information has been accepted as an absolute truth, even where some uncertainty may exist in the statements. For example, a user may state that he or she is from Dallas, Tex., when in fact the user is from a nearby suburb of Dallas, Tex. As a result, the social networking system provides inaccurate information about the hometown of the user to other users of the social networking system. This may lead to ineffective targeted advertising directed towards the user based on inaccurate information. Further, the user experience is diminished because of the inaccurate information being provided. Fundamentally, the information provided on the social networking system by users, entities, and applications on behalf of users and entities may be more accurately described as a series of claims of information that require fact checking, reputation tracking, and/or trust building. Claims are assertions made by an author in the context of an audience. As a result, claims that have been verified as truthful or reliable are very valuable pieces of information about users, entities, and applications in the social networking system.
Social networking systems have not provided tools or mechanisms for enabling users and entities to selectively allow specific users and/or entities to export claims made in building the social graph of interactions between users, entities, and interests. Accurate information about users, their connections with other users, and entities on social networking systems, as well as their interests and preferences provides a better user experience while enabling third-party developers to more accurately target users and better build applications that seek to drive traffic and increase engagement with their websites. However, existing systems have not provided efficient tools and methods to export assertions made by users in building a social graph to other applications, users, entities, and third-party developers.